Let Mobile Website Design Take You Places

These days, more than a quarter of all the people who own a cell phone have used it to go online at some point.That’s a very useful statistic if you’ve only been thinking about people who go online using computers, as mobile website design is growing more gigantic (and potentially profitable) every day.So if your website design isn’t WAP friendly (and if you don’t know what WAP is, you really need to brush up), you could be missing out on millions of potential customers.

These days, everybody’s on the go – even a laptop can still be too big and clunky to hump around.But in the modern world, a lot of people would never dare to be out in public without their cell phone.So designing for these phones isn’t just optional anymore – it’s something you need to start into, if you want to keep your existing audience – and grow your audience by letting existing readers show your amazing content to their friends (who can then immediately look you up, and bookmark you for future visiting).

Since mobile friendly web content is so important, let’s review some important facets of making your web site mobile phone friendly:

*Your web site needs to be coded in either XHTML or XML.If you’re not familiar with these types of coding, you’d better get familiar with ‘em, as it’s a software thing that isn’t going away.

*Character encoding should be UTF-8, again for complex software reasons.Just remember that UTF-8 is important (and either learn it, or find someone who knows it), and you should be fine with making the switch to WAP.

*Obviously, mobile phones have substantially smaller screen sizes than their more probably desk bound cohorts.The largest screen sizes on the market are around 640 x 480 pixels (which hasn’t been industry standard on desktops since the early 90s), while the average is more along the lines of 120 square pixels.Needless to say, huge fonts and massive graphics are a real turn-off when seeing all of one requires a lot of scrolling.

*Don’t expect people to enter lots of text.Instead, give them lists of options, or get creative with buttons of some sort.

*Don’t create huge pages.It’s a bad idea to go over 20 kilobytes, as that typically includes either images, or LOTS of text (which most phone surfers aren’t going to read through, anyway)